Mohamad Taha Ijab

Teaching And Learning Of E-Commerce Courses Via Hybrid E-Learning Model In Unitar

The advent of the Internet in the early 1980s did not attract e-learning instantaneously. Circa 1990s only, universities started looking for the potential of the Internet to deliver teaching and learning to the masses. Universiti Tun Abdul Razak (UNITAR), being the first e-learning university in Malaysia, offers a hybrid model that combines three important components. The three components are the interactive, multimedia content on CDs and on the Web, the face-to-face meetings, and the Internet-based support systems that provide continuous interaction between the students and faculty. This paper describes our experience at UNITAR in designing and teaching Electronic-Commerce (EC) courses using the mentioned hybrid e-learning concept. EC courses in UNITAR were offered for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The curriculum of these courses was developed and modeled after the EC Framework introduced by Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston. Our hybrid e-learning model combines the face-to-face meetings of lecturers and students, and also the use of a Web-based Learning Management System (LMS) that enables continuous interactions via an Virtual Online Instructional Support System (VOISS), Centra as the Online Tutorial (OLT) media, and the multimedia-enabled Web-based courseware.

Social media for environmental sustainability awareness in higher education

Purpose The explosion of social media use such as Facebook among higher education students is deemed to have great potential in widely disseminating environmental sustainability awareness. The paper aims to capture, summarise, synthesise and comment on the role of social media to garner interest of students and staff on environmental sustainability issues. Design/methodology/approach Systematic literature review technique is adopted, and three selected online databases were searched for relevant papers for review. Specific data were extracted from each paper, and the discussion section was based on the developed research questions. Findings Higher education needs to fully leverage the ubiquity of social media to extend how environmental sustainability is viewed by the students and staff. Sustainability practices conducted at the university level such as recycling, reduction of electricity and water consumptions and paper reduction in classroom and used to engage students on environmental matters. For staff, social media can be leveraged as to convey the university policy and assist in their quest to become full-fledged green universities. Research limitations/implications Some of the limitations of this research include the lack of keyword search using synonyms or related terms equivalent to the term “awareness”, lack of forward and backward searches, and the papers were searched until end of 2013 only. Future research needs to take advantage of the current limitations to investigate this topic and be empirically supported by theories using quantitative, qualitative or mixed-method-based research. Future studies could also develop relevant frameworks to propose an effective use of social media for creating environmental sustainability awareness in higher education. Practical implications Propagations of environmental sustainability awareness in higher education would be more effective with the use of social media. Social implications In principle, the increase of environmental awareness level would increase the students’ good behavioural conduct on environmental sustainability. Originality/value While the broad topic of environmental sustainability in higher education is widely discussed, the role of social media in shaping environmental sustainability awareness is still under researched. This situation provides a significant potential for exploration by sustainability researchers to craft their investigation on the effective role of social media in creating environmental awareness in higher education.

Role of social media in information-seeking behaviour of international students: A systematic literature review

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the information-seeking behaviour of international students in terms of their information needs and to highlight the role of social media.,In this paper, a systematic literature survey was conducted in order to investigate information-seeking trends among international students while using social media. As a result, an exhaustive systematic literature review (SLR) was carried out in order to investigate social media as a source for the observation of the behaviours of international students. For this purpose, 71 articles were selected from various well-known sources after an intensive SLR process of searching, filtering and enforcing the inclusion and exclusion criteria.,As an outcome of this study, the information-seeking behaviour of international students was highlighted with respect to social media as a source of information. In addition, this research identifies the information needs of the international students and categorizes them by the roles played by the social media in fulfilling the information needs.,A comparative study that highlighted the dearth of studies which merge the social media and information-seeking behaviour of international students as well as identify the future direction for the researchers and for benefits of international students.,A detail SLR which highlights the need of shifting the information seeking behaviour from libraries to social media in regard to the new environment for international students.